Pokemon: Mewtwo strikes back

Stand aside, for I am the master of Perplexichu, the 152nd Pokémon species of the Head-Slapping variety, with the special power of Gape! In combat, my Pokémon can muster the Alarmed Gaze, before which poorly trained moviemakers crumble! My Pokémon can even transform into Irkadon, a highly evolved Pokémon of the Cranky Critic variety! Hmm!

Upon confronting Pokémon: the First Movie, I as Pokémon Master declare, yes! Under my command, there will be a thousand more Pokémovies! Without my own Pokémon to battle other Pokémon just as some have illegally set fighting cocks on each other for fun and profit, I might've thought, five minutes into the lysergic introductory short Pikachu's Vacation, that I'd died and gone to very-bad-acid hell. In fact, entire hunks of the feature (about a cloned, psychic feline Pokémon endeavoring to take over the world by cloning more Pokémon, the bastard!) made me wish I was Dopechu, air Pokémon of the Peyote variety. Amid the low-grade Akira brimstone, noxious cuteness, and stone-knives animation, the Pokémon universe reveals itself here to the newcomer as possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics. It makes the Star Wars mythos play like Pong.

Reeling in Poké-sorrow as the movie climaxed with the evil clone Pikachu pounding the peacefully protesting original Pikachu, Perplexichu didn't buy the antiviolence message any more than I did, since Pokémon live to serve masters like me! and fight! Grown-ups will be stunned into a brain-blockaded silence, but kids everywhere, for whom this is a motivational training film for increased binging on trading cards and video games, will bask as if in an opium fog.